Boffins in America say they have worked out a method of creating small black holes in the laboratory for experimental purposes. They seem unconcerned at the prospect of possibly destroying the earth, creating a portal into a parallel universe where peckish man-eating dinosaurs rule etc.
Many scientists, of course, have sought to …

Gimme a portable model

er...

Have these idiots never played half-life??

"Because we can't yet take measurements from real black holes, we need a way to recreate this phenomenon in the lab in order to study it, to validate it." - why do we need this? are you trying justify having a job you planet threatening lab monkey

We're so not going to get to 2012

Let's collapse the planet!

What's the mass of the smallest black hole that would be self-sustaining if you just dropped it through the laboratory floor, that is, it would suck in material fast enough to counteract the Hawking radiation and keep on growing, till the whole Earth is a tiny black hole and all that's left of mankind is a few space probes waiting for further orders that will never come?

You know how you hate those geeks who technobabble on and on about "the singularity"? Let's give them a different kind of singularity!

Where can I get one?

I could do with a 'desktop black hole'. It would probably work better than this shredder which chokes if asked to do more than 3 sheets at a time. And would finally let me properly dispose of a growing pile of obsolete backup tapes that I wasn't allowed to wall up in the old fireplace in the office that was boarded up the other month...

Smaller?

The fools!

Don't they know that black holes in the universe are not collapsed stars! They are the remains or lack of, of civilisations that went too far! The stupid apes created something they didn't understand that destroyed them!

btw Americans and risk. Hitler was advised that an atomic bomb could set off a chain reaction in the atmosphere that could turn the planet into a cinder, the merkins knew of the risk, but what the hell, and now they are doing it again.

Little boy was uranium based and tested at the Trinity test

Fat man was plutonium based and never tested, or was it (German bomb already tested?)

Unconvinced

I wouldn't mind betting this device bears almost exactly no resemblance whatsoever to a black hole of any kind. They've just distorted reality in their paper (i.e. lied) enough to confuse ignorant journalists into thinking it does - thereby hoping to make Dartmouth a little less obscure than it was.

After all, who's going to fund stuffing some squids up a waveguide unless you bullshit them a bit?

On completion the control system will say

If the Dartmouth boffins screw this up....

And hurt somebody with their home-grown singularities, I am going to suggest that the eggheads in question be fed the the inter-dimensional dinosaurs!!

This article seems to be saying that the scientists think they should do this because "We know black holes are dangerous matter-destroying/radiation emitting monsters in outer space, but theres a chance that they evaporate, and to make sure that they evaporate we need to create some of these here on earth. Of course, they may not evaporate, in which case we are all up crap creek without a paddle."

Next week I am expecting a grant request from Dartmouth on "Optimal stick modalities derived from the stimulation via prodding of malnourished ursine test subjects"

What's the point of imitating the wrong properties?

Imitation proves nothing!

This thing won't be a real black hole (which would first eat the desk it is on top of, then the planet and with it any experimental results (unless those are first beeped off into space before the event horizon can lock them in)).

Nope. It is an imitation. In other words it shares some properties with a backhole, not all.

It is surely the non-imitated properties (earth eating gravity etc) that really count when trying to investigate the Hawking radiation. Just having a heavy black thing on your desk (a canon ball or equivalent) won't cut it.

Nothing new

This is nothing new, my daughter made a black hole years ago. It's called her room, whatever goes in doesn't come out (except her of course, but she wears these strange clothes that seem to protect her).

Black Hole != What you may think it is

Take your coffee mug. Let's call the gravitational effect it has on your keyboard Wcm (Weight due to Coffee Mug).

Compress the coffee mug until the atoms are so tightly packed that light cannot escape from the surface of it (you might need some kind of big vice for this step). What's its gravitational effect on your keyboard?

Wcm. Exactly the fucking same (blah blah blah minor second order effects etc - shut up, Hawking, you're distracting from the key point). Making something into a black hole does not suddenly increase its mass.

Ermmm....

Hang on a sec...

These psuedo-black holes will be "much tinier" (failing English, clearly) than the real thing? Which bit of infinitely small, infinitely dense do they not quite grasp? I'm not sure you *can* make something smaller than a quantumn singularity....

Jack the Bodiless went to Dartmouth

@Steve Swann

"Which bit of infinitely small, infinitely dense do they not quite grasp? I'm not sure you *can* make something smaller than a quantumn singularity...."

Smaller amount of mass, smaller event horizon, anything else?

And the AC that suggests smaller black holes are more "powerful", in a way, yes. From memory, the amount of Hawking Radiation emitted is inversly proportional to the mass of the black hole. That's why they need to create "small" ones, as astronomically created ones (at least recent ones) are too massive (as in too much mass) that the Hawking Radiation emitted is below the temperature of the microwave background radiation, so we can't measure it. If we could find an elusive primordial black hole, in theory we'd be able to meassure it, but distinguishing the final burst of gamma rays from any other event in the universe would be difficult, and you'd have to be looking in the right direction at the right time.

With a smaller one (we're talking about quantum mechanical black holes here), they'll disappear almost instantly, mimicing the death throws of a primordial black hole, and hopefully showing up a massive amount of energy/Hawking Radiation. In fact, the energy levels will be along the lines of the mass of the black hole. (remember mass/energy equivalency?)

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,

wtf !!

The plot is afoot.

Renowned uberboffin Stephen Hawking rolled past the array of superconducting quantum interference devices. He lunged for the nearest peer-reviewed paper he could see, one of his own. Grabbing the baffling text, the sixty-seven-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it slipped from the shelf and Hawking collapsed backward in a heap beneath his chair. A chillingly weird looking assassin loomed over him from the doorway chillingly. "Now you will die," the tall scarred killer said. Mr Stephen Hawking, 67, only just had time to see what the man was holding - a black hole! Only just time, that is, before being brutally black-holed to death by none other than the other man present in the room!

Re: Naming Convention

@Secretgeek:

Surely "famously-still-alive NHS-user robovoice uberboffin"? Then we'd also get the Portal references as well as yank-healthcare-debate-mockery, and that would be a triumph, and we'd be able to make a note - "huge success!".